Music maketh Christmas

For many Kenyans who were youngsters in the 1980s and 1990s, memories of Christmas in the village revolve around new clothes, a healthy serving of chapati, rice and meat and, of course, an entire bottle of Fanta.

Not for me, though. I have racked my memory for remembrance of new clothes but drawn a blank. In my mind, Christmas is associated with music.

The festive season was the time we got to know the new songs that had come hot out of the studios down in River Road.

SAHANI ZA KINANDA

Back in the day, one of my uncles, a lorry driver, would come home for the festivities with two prized possessions; a red vinyl record player and a pile of tar-black records with blue, green, orange and sometimes magenta halos around the hole where the record met the player. We called the records sahani za kinanda but the correct name was santuri.

On many a night, my uncle would put the record player atop a big clay pot, with the speakers placed strategically in empty jerricans around his single room. The rest of the space would be cleared for dancing. Only the man selecting the music had a seat. Everyone else had to be on their feet, their platform heels digging into the earthen floor, their bell-bottoms sweeping everything clean around them.

Young men and nymphs of their age would show up in large numbers and stay late into the night, dancing away to music by such singers as Daniel Kamau, whom we only knew as ‘DK’. The song that has stuck in my memory is an intriguing number that DK sang about a maiden who had no blushes.

It took me years to understand why she used to hide in her mother’s house whenever men her age were seeking her company. Ironically, she had no qualms jumping into the waiting arms of older men. Looking back now and having observed the emerging social trends involving sponsors and slay queens, I think we have failed to give DK sufficient credit for his use of foreshadowing as a stylistic device in music.

ENGLISH SONGS

It was during those dancing sessions that I also got to learn about a musician that I believe I was named after; Mwalimu James Mbugua. He had many beloved songs, but the one that struck a cord for me was Murata Tigwo Uhoro, a song in which a love-struck man is bidding a heartfelt farewell to his sweetheart. In it, he beseeches her to let his hand go and stop shedding tears because he has a matatu to catch and there was hope that they would surely meet again.

“Only our bodies are parting, not our hearts,” he crooned plaintively. In the 1990s, the Christmas repertoire widened considerably for two main reasons. The first was that more young people had made their way to the capital and their choice of music became eclectic. The second was that the two-faced record was replaced by the cassette, while the record player, which, in later years, would metamorphose into a complex machine that came to be known as the turn-table, was succeeded by the tape player.

As a result, both the number of songs that one could play, and the variety of artistes invariably went up. For the first time, English songs made their way into the Christmas season evenings offering in rural Kenya. Among the new entrants into this band of village entertainers were Don Williams, Dolly Parton and Boney M. For the first time, we could play these songs back to back, especially if the players had two decks.

SIX BATTERIES

The only problem was that the cassette players used to take six Eveready batteries, and the batteries used to last for at most a few hours. With every radio owner dashing to the local shop for more batteries, the stocks in the entire village would run out by Christmas eve and we would be left with no option but to air the batteries in the sun, hoping they would be recharged by Christmas Day.

This problem did not last many years, however. It was remedied when the car battery roared its way into the Christmas scene and became a constant companion of the cassette player. Not only did it have more power, which meant that we could use the volume knob more liberally, it also lasted longer. But this came at a cost.

Discos, as we used to call the dancing sessions, ceased to be free. One had to pay a fee, say Sh5, for entry, even into a cubicle. Woe unto the man who tried to dance with a maiden that another man had paid entry charges for. This was when the Christmas nights stopped being a joy to the world as young men wrestled each other in the night.

Such brawls aside, the car batteries became a precursor to rural electrification, in part because their owners lacked the energy to lug them back to the capital and also because they could also be used to power black-and-white television sets. Were it not for Christmas, there are many parts of rural Kenya that would still be slumbering in the shadows of darkness, soothed by the music of crickets chirping under the eerie gaze of the Christmas night moon.

FM STATIONS

From these annual dancing rituals, a new entertainment lifestyle was born. It dawned on families that they could buy radios that required only two batteries, and with these, they could listen to all the songs they wanted, all day till midnight when the KBC stations closed. The more upwardly mobile invested in 14-inch television sets, powered by the car batteries.

This, in turn, gave rise to the demand for solar lighting. Like lovers, music and light made their way into the village, tentatively at Christmas time and more courageously as the years rolled by. By 1995 or thereabouts, FM stations exploded into the scene. The music selection available to youngsters hit the roof, so to speak.

There was an avalanche of genres and the music of the past had to give way to the raucous sounds of hip hop, faster R ‘n B beats, rap, more soul, techno and a plethora of blends that brought two, sometimes three genres of music together. It was around this time that Cher made a big impression, as happened with her 1998 hit, Believe.

There was no place for old school any more. Songs like The Chosen Few by The Dooleys or Why have you left the one you left me For, by Crystal Gayle, no longer had a place on the dusty Christmas dance floor in the village. They had to pave the way for Tupac Shakur’s Dear Mama, Snoop Doggy Dog’s and Dr Dre’s No Diggity, Tank’s I Deserve and a smattering of other songs by Africans like Angelique Kidjo who had made it big on the world stage.

SOPHISTICATED PALATE

Globalisation had made its way to the village, and not just for Christmas, thanks to the exponential increase in the number of music-playing devices in rural homes. Local music was having trouble making it to the playing list. It was no longer cool.

It did not help matters that the younger generation believed that their palate for music was more sophisticated and, therefore, deserved precedence over all other choices. The only place that the older generation got to select the music was on the car radio, and that was because they owned and drove the cars.

Today, songs like the Christmas version of Thitima by Kaymo and Stigah may be filling the void that was left by the exclusion of their local predecessors. But you will not hear it blaring from bluetooth-enabled loudspeakers in rural cubicles.

After all, there will be youngsters enjoying it via their mobile phones, their earphones dangling around their necks. For them, it will not matter if they have new clothes, or a healthy helping of chapati, rice and nyama choma. Their biggest worry will be whether they will have sufficient airtime bundles to last them till New Year.

Mr Mbugua is the Editor of the Saturday Nation. [email protected]